Modern Warfare 3 Haters Are Review-Bombing The Wrong Game

We probably agree that “Modern Warfare III” is a bad name for a brand-new Call of Duty game. It doesn’t help that 2011 first-person shooter Modern Warfare 3 is, to this day, a fan-favorite title in the neverending war series, while series reboot Modern Warfare III, which releases officially on November 10, is floundering in its spiritless early access period. The games have a good cop, bad cop thing going on, though; apparently, neither are distinct enough to stop furious fans from reviewing bombing the wrong one.

Even after community members, like popular CoD Twitter account WarzoneIntel, pointed out that MWIII (2023) haters were unintentionally tanking rating scores for their cherished MW3 (2011) shortly after the former’s early access period began on November 2, people still can’t tell the difference. Every hour, MW3’s audience reviews on Google are getting flooded with contemporary, one-star vitriol.

Read More: The Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Franchise, Explained

“The comments here seem to be a mix of people reviewing MW3 (2011) and MW3 (2023, the one this page is actually for),” a top comment says, apparently missing the brief game description Google presents alongside reviews—“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a 2011 first-person shooter video game…”

“In short the game is terrible, the whole thing is lazy, everything is recycled and halfassed,” the popular audience review continues.

“All these 5 star reviews have to be fake and paid for,” another comment says, ignoring the years-old time stamps on many five-star reviews. “This has to be the worst campaign ever created by call of duty.”

Though it is misplaced anger, the content of it—CoD is boring, exploitative, etc.—actually reminds me a lot of 2011 MW3’s initial audience reviews. While that game’s Metacritic reviews are similarly taking hits for MWIII, receiving a new round of low ratings daily (“This game is destroyed for me,” proclaims a November 5 review, “I will never buy call of duty again), a huge portion of negative ratings are about 10 years old.

“MW3 makes absolutely no initiative to take forward progress in making [Activison’s] game better,” says one from 2012. “This is why it’s truly The Same Game.” Some things never change.